Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Conserving critical sites for biodiversity provides disproportionate benefits to people.

ABSTRACT: Protecting natural habitats in priority areas is essential to halt the loss of biodiversity. Yet whether these benefits for biodiversity also yield benefits for human well-being remains controversial. Here we assess the potential human well-being benefits of safeguarding a global network of sites identified as top priorities for the conservation of threatened species. Conserving these sites would yield benefits--in terms of a) climate change mitigation through avoidance of CO(2) emissions from deforestation; b) freshwater services to downstream human populations; c) retention of option value; and d) benefits to maintenance of human cultural diversity--significantly exceeding those anticipated from randomly selected sites within the same countries and ecoregions. Results suggest that safeguarding sites important for biodiversity conservation provides substantial benefits to human well-being.

SUBMITTER: Larsen FW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3364245 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

Conserving critical sites for biodiversity provides disproportionate benefits to people.

Larsen Frank W FW Turner Will R WR Brooks Thomas M TM

PloS one 20120530 5

Protecting natural habitats in priority areas is essential to halt the loss of biodiversity. Yet whether these benefits for biodiversity also yield benefits for human well-being remains controversial. Here we assess the potential human well-being benefits of safeguarding a global network of sites identified as top priorities for the conservation of threatened species. Conserving these sites would yield benefits--in terms of a) climate change mitigation through avoidance of CO(2) emissions from d ...[more]

PMID: 22666337

Similar Datasets

Threat management priorities for conserving Antarctic biodiversity.

Project description:Antarctic terrestrial biodiversity faces multiple threats, from invasive species to climate change. Yet no large-scale assessments of threat management strategies exist. Applying a structured participatory approach, we demonstrate that existing conservation efforts are insufficient in a changing world, estimating that 65% (at best 37%, at worst 97%) of native terrestrial taxa and land-associated seabirds are likely to decline by 2100 under current trajectories. Emperor penguins are identified as the most vulnerable taxon, followed by other seabirds and dry soil nematodes. We find that implementing 10 key threat management strategies in parallel, at an estimated present-day equivalent annual cost of US$23 million, could benefit up to 84% of Antarctic taxa. Climate change is identified as the most pervasive threat to Antarctic biodiversity and influencing global policy to effectively limit climate change is the most beneficial conservation strategy. However, minimising impacts of human activities and improved planning and management of new infrastructure projects are cost-effective and will help to minimise regional threats. Simultaneous global and regional efforts are critical to secure Antarctic biodiversity for future generations.

| S-EPMC9778584 | biostudies-literature

Reconciling global priorities for conserving biodiversity habitat.

Project description:Degradation and loss of natural habitat is the major driver of the current global biodiversity crisis. Most habitat conservation efforts to date have targeted small areas of highly threatened habitat, but emerging debate suggests that retaining large intact natural systems may be just as important. We reconcile these perspectives by integrating fine-resolution global data on habitat condition and species assemblage turnover to identify Earth's high-value biodiversity habitat. These are areas in better condition than most other locations predicted to have once supported a similar assemblage of species and are found within both intact regions and human-dominated landscapes. However, only 18.6% of this high-value habitat is currently protected globally. Averting permanent biodiversity loss requires clear, spatially explicit targets for retaining these unprotected high-value habitats.

| S-EPMC7211919 | biostudies-literature

Conserving biodiversity takes a plan: How planners implement ecological information for biodiversity conservation.

Project description:Conserving biodiversity is critical to the sustainability of human settlements, and stands to benefit from collaboration between ecologists focused on understanding natural systems and planners balancing social, environmental, and economic priorities. Drawing from the socially-situated definition of 'sustainability', we sought to understand the relationship between ecologists and planners by probing how planners in the southeastern US prioritize and engage with biodiversity conservation and ecological information, and how context influences these decisions. We find that context matters, e.g., higher jurisdictional population density was positively associated with prioritizing tree cover and diversity. We find, also, that while biodiversity conservation and ecological information are valuable to planners, planners rely heavily on their colleagues to inform conservation-related activities and prioritize conservation topics that differ from ecological research foci. Improved communication by ecologists and context-specific transdisciplinary sustainability research, especially that which incorporates the primary role of elected officials in biodiversity conservation, may help to integrate ecological science and planning practice.

| S-EPMC7320128 | biostudies-literature

Mapping the planet's critical areas for biodiversity and nature's contributions to people.

Project description:Meeting global commitments to conservation, climate, and sustainable development requires consideration of synergies and tradeoffs among targets. We evaluate the spatial congruence of ecosystems providing globally high levels of nature's contributions to people, biodiversity, and areas with high development potential across several sectors. We find that conserving approximately half of global land area through protection or sustainable management could provide 90% of the current levels of ten of nature's contributions to people and meet minimum representation targets for 26,709 terrestrial vertebrate species. This finding supports recent commitments by national governments under the Global Biodiversity Framework to conserve at least 30% of global lands and waters, and proposals to conserve half of the Earth. More than one-third of areas required for conserving nature's contributions to people and species are also highly suitable for agriculture, renewable energy, oil and gas, mining, or urban expansion. This indicates potential conflicts among conservation, climate and development goals.

| S-EPMC10781687 | biostudies-literature

Conserving tropical biodiversity via market forces and spatial targeting.

Project description:The recent report from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity [(2010) Global Biodiversity Outlook 3] acknowledges that ongoing biodiversity loss necessitates swift, radical action. Protecting undisturbed lands, although vital, is clearly insufficient, and the key role of unprotected, private land owned is being increasingly recognized. Seeking to avoid common assumptions of a social planner backed by government interventions, the present work focuses on the incentives of the individual landowner. We use detailed data to show that successful conservation on private land depends on three factors: conservation effectiveness (impact on target species), private costs (especially reductions in production), and private benefits (the extent to which conservation activities provide compensation, for example, by enhancing the value of remaining production). By examining the high-profile issue of palm-oil production in a major tropical biodiversity hotspot, we show that the levels of both conservation effectiveness and private costs are inherently spatial; varying the location of conservation activities can radically change both their effectiveness and private cost implications. We also use an economic choice experiment to show that consumers' willingness to pay for conservation-grade palm-oil products has the potential to incentivize private producers sufficiently to engage in conservation activities, supporting vulnerable International Union for Conservation of Nature Red Listed species. However, these incentives vary according to the scale and efficiency of production and the extent to which conservation is targeted to optimize its cost-effectiveness. Our integrated, interdisciplinary approach shows how strategies to harness the power of the market can usefully complement existing--and to-date insufficient--approaches to conservation.

| S-EPMC4475989 | biostudies-literature

Conserving biodiversity efficiently: what to do, where, and when.

Project description:Conservation priority-setting schemes have not yet combined geographic priorities with a framework that can guide the allocation of funds among alternate conservation actions that address specific threats. We develop such a framework, and apply it to 17 of the world's 39 Mediterranean ecoregions. This framework offers an improvement over approaches that only focus on land purchase or species richness and do not account for threats. We discover that one could protect many more plant and vertebrate species by investing in a sequence of conservation actions targeted towards specific threats, such as invasive species control, land acquisition, and off-reserve management, than by relying solely on acquiring land for protected areas. Applying this new framework will ensure investment in actions that provide the most cost-effective outcomes for biodiversity conservation. This will help to minimise the misallocation of scarce conservation resources.

| S-EPMC1950771 | biostudies-literature

Molecular biogeography: towards an integrated framework for conserving pan-African biodiversity.

Project description:BackgroundBiogeographic models partition ecologically similar species assemblages into discrete ecoregions. However, the history, relationship and interactions between these regions and their assemblages have rarely been explored.Methodology/principal findingsHere we develop a taxon-based approach that explicitly utilises molecular information to compare ecoregion history and status, which we exemplify using a continentally distributed mammalian species: the African bushbuck (Tragelaphus scriptus). We reveal unprecedented levels of genetic diversity and structure in this species and show that ecoregion biogeographic history better explains the distribution of molecular variation than phenotypic similarity or geography. We extend these data to explore ecoregion connectivity, identify core habitats and infer ecological affinities from them.Conclusions/significanceThis analysis defines 28 key biogeographic regions for sub-Saharan Africa, and provides a valuable framework for the incorporation of genetic and biogeographic information into a more widely applicable model for the conservation of continental biodiversity.

| S-EPMC1866246 | biostudies-literature

Ecosystem services and opportunity costs shift spatial priorities for conserving forest biodiversity.

Project description:Inclusion of spatially explicit information on ecosystem services in conservation planning is a fairly new practice. This study analyses how the incorporation of ecosystem services as conservation features can affect conservation of forest biodiversity and how different opportunity cost constraints can change spatial priorities for conservation. We created spatially explicit cost-effective conservation scenarios for 59 forest biodiversity features and five ecosystem services in the county of Telemark (Norway) with the help of the heuristic optimisation planning software, Marxan with Zones. We combined a mix of conservation instruments where forestry is either completely (non-use zone) or partially restricted (partial use zone). Opportunity costs were measured in terms of foregone timber harvest, an important provisioning service in Telemark. Including a number of ecosystem services shifted priority conservation sites compared to a case where only biodiversity was considered, and increased the area of both the partial (+36.2%) and the non-use zone (+3.2%). Furthermore, opportunity costs increased (+6.6%), which suggests that ecosystem services may not be a side-benefit of biodiversity conservation in this area. Opportunity cost levels were systematically changed to analyse their effect on spatial conservation priorities. Conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services trades off against timber harvest. Currently designated nature reserves and landscape protection areas achieve a very low proportion (9.1%) of the conservation targets we set in our scenario, which illustrates the high importance given to timber production at present. A trade-off curve indicated that large marginal increases in conservation target achievement are possible when the budget for conservation is increased. Forty percent of the maximum hypothetical opportunity costs would yield an average conservation target achievement of 79%.

| S-EPMC4230974 | biostudies-literature

Psychological benefits of greenspace increase with biodiversity.

Project description:The world's human population is becoming concentrated into cities, giving rise to concerns that it is becoming increasingly isolated from nature. Urban public greenspaces form the arena of many people's daily contact with nature and such contact has measurable physical and psychological benefits. Here we show that these psychological benefits increase with the species richness of urban greenspaces. Moreover, we demonstrate that greenspace users can more or less accurately perceive species richness depending on the taxonomic group in question. These results indicate that successful management of urban greenspaces should emphasize biological complexity to enhance human well-being in addition to biodiversity conservation.

| S-EPMC2390667 | biostudies-literature

Conserving evolutionarily distinct species is critical to safeguard human well-being.

Project description:Although there is growing interest in safeguarding the Tree of Life to preserve the human benefits that are directly provided by biodiversity, their evolutionary distribution remains unknown, which has hampered our understanding of the potential of phylodiversity indicators to evince them. Here, I drew on a global review of plant benefits and comprehensive phylogenetic information to breakdown their evolutionary distribution and thereby show why the commonly used Phylogenetic Diversity and Evolutionary Distinctiveness indicators can unequivocally help to preserve these natural services. Beneficial species clumped within phylogenetically overdispersed genera and closely related species often contributed very few and redundant benefits, suggesting that multiple plant lineages are required to maintain a wide variety of services. Yet, a reduced number of species stood out as multi-beneficial and evolutionarily distinct plants relative to both the entire phylogeny and the subset of beneficial species, and they collectively contributed a higher-than-expected number of records for most types of benefits. In addition to providing a clear mechanistic understanding for the recently proved success of Phylogenetic Diversity in capturing plant benefits, these findings stress the decisive role that conservation programmes aimed at protecting evolutionarily distinct taxa will play in safeguarding the beneficial potential of biodiversity for the future.

| S-EPMC8683420 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data